Alternative Init System

[Phillip Susi]

Tristan Wibberley wrote:
> 
> NT does not handle this properly. Service granular dependency is not 
> even descriptive enough to cope properly with the needs of the services 
> of a plain Exchange server. That's why you get mysterious warnings and 
> errors in the event log that are not warnings and errors. I think 

It allows you to describe what other services this one depends on by 
name or group, what more do you need?  If certain services fail to 
properly utilize it that's neither here nor there.

> feature granular dependency is required, IMHO, which requires that 
> services all just start and block early, either on IO, or waiting for 
> the features they depend on to start.
> 
> It means dependencies can be discovered from service configurations 
> rather than being statically conservative, and parallelism is used to 
> the utmost.
> 

That's simply removing dependencies altogether.  That certainly is a 
nice idea when practical, for instance, the X server should be able to 
start up, and the gdm login paint the login prompt before the mouse is 
detected and configured.  It can begin to function later without holding 
up X and gdm from starting.

I wonder if we can come up with a list of services that currently fail 
in situations like that but could probably be modified to just do the 
right thing when the other service comes online later, and a list of 
services that already will work fine when launched in parallel but are 
configured to start sequentially.